Wednesday, February 20, 2013

{2 for 1} Weekly Kid's Co-Op + Project 101: Weekly Library Challenge

This week, I am combining two of my weekly posts into one. It worked out well since what we have been reading this week is all related to Dr. Seuss (again!) and there were some fun Dr. Seuss activities shared at the Kid's Co-Op last week. If you love Dr. Seuss, too, you can find even more wonderful Dr. Seuss activities here, the Virtual Book Club for Kids Blog Hop.

Now, on to what we are reading this week with Project 101: The Weekly Library Challenge where each week I share two books: 1 the boys are reading and 1 that I am reading. This week both books relate to Dr. Seuss. For the boys, it is one we have mentioned before, but not featured in Project 101: If I Ran the Circus by Dr. Seuss in which a little boy reimagines an empty lot as a magical circus that he runs. The boys love the fantastical elements and all of the animals and grand events that take place at this special circus, and I think it resonates with their own grand imaginative abilities to turn anything (a pile of dirt, some rocks, sticks, etc.) into a magical scene just as the boy in the book does.

As for me, with Dr. Seuss Day coming up in early March and the Virtual Book Club for Kids featuring Dr. Seuss, I got into the spirit and continued my biography/autobiography book kick with Theodore SEUSS Giesel by Donald E. Pease, a biography of the author so many came to know and love as Dr. Seuss. While it was slow going to capture my interest at first, I am now more than halfway through and truly enjoying it as it provides insight, from the perspective of this author, into what made Dr. Seuss the amazing author of children's books that he was and it has taught me much about the other work that Giesel did as an artist and writer.

What I appreciate the most is what he shares of Giesel's own words, in 1949, when he comes to realize the importance of children's books and of starting with children if one hopes to create a better world:

In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that Books for Children have a greater potential for good , or evil, than any other form of literature on earth. They realize that the new generations must grow up to be more intelligent than ours.

Peace also tells of the all important realization Giesel had in 1949 that children's books must make reading fun and meaningful and that Giesel, or rather Dr. Seuss, felt is was important to respect what he saw as the innate sense of justice that children have and of valuing and respecting the intelligence and autonomy of children -- that children know when they are being tricked or kidded, but that children also enjoy pretending. For him, children possess a sense of fairness and justice alongside a need to belong and participate - to be part of something, and the biography goes on to share the ways that Dr. Seuss books grow out of these concepts and seek to nourish these traits -- and is serving as reminder to me to make sure I am also nourishing these wonderful traits in my children: their sense of justice and fairness, their intelligence and autonomy, their desire to imagine and pretend, their need to belong and feel loved. In short, as I read these parts of the book, I become inspired -- as a parent and as a producer. Thank You, Dr. Seuss. I am also sharing this post at Read.Explore.Learn and the Kid Lit Blog Hop!

There are so many Seuss ideas floating around right now. I love when his birthday rolls around! I love your cookies - I'll have to try something like that out. Thanks for linking into the Kid Lit Blog Hop. :)